I am a Corel kind of bird myself, having used it both professionally (which is how I got started with it) and at home for a couple of decades now. I will say two things about that:

In its current version Inkscape is roughly on par with were CorelDraw was in its 4.0 state or thereabouts (which I still have a copy of, on like seventeen 3.5" floppy disks!) which sounds like damning with faint praise but it really isn't considering that Inkscape costs nothing to use.

However, one factor that I think most people don't think about is that Inkscape is currently the best software I've ever used, bar none, for ripping apart .pdf documents made by other software, for the purposes of monkeying with their contents. And that's a ten story tall flaming middle finger to Adobe, and completely obviates the need for 99.9999999% of all users to ever have to pay for the "pro" version of Adobe Acrobat or whatever they're calling it this week just to be able to made minor adjustments to a .pdf.

[–] Paradachshund 13 points 9 hours ago (2 children)

This is good to know!

You may not know if you exclusively use Corel, but where do you think Corel stands compared to Illustrator these days?

I'm a pro graphic designer, so you can be as technical as you like.

I've been messing around with Affinity Designer a bit lately, and while it's gotten a lot better over the years (and some features have surpassed Adobe), the little things and workflow stuff is still such a step down I find it hard to want to use it still.

[–] Tuuli@lemmy.world 6 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

I use both Corel and Illustrator for work but I'm very much more "fluent" with Illustrator. I'd say they have a bit different focus. While I hate Adobe with a passion, I'd say Illustrator is a lot better. My co-worker who works with large format printing, likes Corel more.

[–] Paradachshund 2 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Appreciate that perspective. I also can't wait to kick Adobe to the curb someday, but I usually have the same experience when trying alternatives.

Adobe stuff is slowly falling apart though it feels like. It's coasting on the brilliant work of the original devs pre-creative cloud, and while there have been a few genuinely good features added over the years, I hate to say that most new features they add feel like amateur hour to me. They just lack the level of polish and attention to detail that old features had. It doesn't feel like the people making it understand the workflow of a professional anymore. They're also just getting slow. Whenever I open Affinity I'm struck by how much more performant it feels!

[–] Tuuli@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago

Yes, slowly falling apart is a good description. I'm actually thinking of just switching careers. I work in print, so Adobe is pretty much a standard, there are very few viable alternatives.

[–] dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 2 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago) (1 children)

No idea, unfortunately. I have not touched any of the professional Adobe products in any detail since abandoning Premiere Pro back in probably around 2009. I briefly dabbled with a pirated version of Illustrator when I first got my X1 Yoga and discovered that it did not work correctly with the inbuilt stylus, full stop, and I abandoned it on the spot. I haven't looked back since.

I did not choose the Corel suite on purpose at the beginning but when I was starting out working professionally it's what the company worked for used in house, and I've stuck with it ever since due to CorelDraw and PhotoPaint doing everything I need and my continued familiarity with it. From what I understand Illustrator is more complex and for that reason some people insist it's more "powerful," but I suspect that really just means it's more byzantine and harder to use. I've never not been able to do anything I needed to do with the Corel suite, except:

CorelDraw is to this day useless for editing .pdfs. Which is pretty damn rich for a professional graphics editing suite that costs $400 for a full license. I mean, it can, insofar as the file open and import dialogs will let you choose and load one, but it basically never works right and tends to produce a broken mess. Somehow Inkscape always works for me. So I have a copy of it around on all my machines alongside Corel, for those instances where I need to tweak or extract something from a .pdf and whoever gave it to me won't provide the source.

[–] Paradachshund 1 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

I've been curious about Corel for a while, so I may need to bite the bullet and get it sometime.

Illustrator is absolutely a byzantine mess lmao. The reason it's so favored (I don't want to say loved, but favored) is because of the depth of features, and also how fast it is to work in once you've learned it's bizarre interface.

Some of it is definitely unfamiliarity, but I always find when using Affinity that things that are a single click or a hotkey + click in illustrator are multiple clicks without a hotkey in affinity. In isolation not a huge difference, but when you do it full time it adds up.

[–] dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 1 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Your workflow in the main Corel suite apps is completely customizable. It has a default layout and shortcut configuration as well as a preset that it comes with which allegedly apes Illustrator's, but you can if you prefer redefine almost everything.

You can choose what tools go in your toolbars, which options show in your drop down menus, where those toolbars are located, and you can even reconfigure the keyboard shortcuts for literally every command, including adding shortcuts to commands which don't have one by default. I think the only limitation is that they can't conflict with inbuilt OS hotkeys, e.g. you can't bind anything to Alt + F4.

You can also perform macros and script the main suite apps using VBA which is only mildly opaque, but opens up the possibility of a world of batch processing tricks if you feel like going down that rabbit hole. I prefer to use Imagemagick for that sort of thing, personally.

[–] Paradachshund 1 points 2 hours ago

That's definitely good stuff. Affinity is also lacking in interface customization I've found.

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